Becoming
by eiswein
Summary: "Who are you?"... "I am whatever my master wishes."
1. Who are you?

**Author's note: **So this fic combines my love of prequels and flashbacks with my love of Sebastian, and is kind of my take on the story of Ciel and Sebastian's bond from beginning to end. I haven't read the manga, and things are mostly based off the anime, so I apologize for any inconsistencies that result. My characterization of Sebastian mostly stems from my fascination with him being immortal, and takes a less religious, more metaphysical view of what a 'demon' would be. Also, this will be a love story, and Ciel is not aged up, so ... yeah. Ahem.

**Warnings:** Eventual SebaCiel, lots of dark, disturbing, mature subject matter

_Also, this fic is currently cross-posted, and several chapters ahead, at AO3 (my AO3 author name is_ icewine_)  
_

* * *

**Prologue**

* * *

_Is it time?_

Time is a strange thing for a demon.

On an infinite timeline, everything feels static. From an infinite distance, every moment shrinks down to zero.

The demon looks up at the tapestry of stars in the sky and sees a thousand ghosts – the reverberating lights of stars that died many thousands of years ago. And yet their image remains, inert and unchanging, stubbornly fixed upon the night sky as if in denial of their own demise. Each night he looks up and sees the same scattering of lights. He knows that one night, he will look up and see these lights extinguished, only to be replaced by others, as indistinguishable from the first as pebbles on a beach, as interchangeable as the grains of sand on the hills of an ancient desert. And the universe will continue to move, to expand, to exist, oblivious to the death and birth of stars, oblivious to the passage of time.

On an infinite timeline, everything begins in order to end. Everything ends in order to begin.

Within an infinite existence, everything will recur, again and again, never moving forward, never evolving, never becoming something other than it was.

In an infinite universe, does everything remain stagnant, entombed as if in amber in the eternal memory of the cosmos?

* * *

**Chapter 1: Who are you?**

* * *

The demon sat perched on the spire of the temple, looking down upon the bloodbath below. The local gang of bandits and daggermen had gathered around their prey and were tearing at the robed figure's flesh like a pack of hyenas pouncing on a gazelle. He was beaten with sticks and stones, then mutilated with a sickle, and finally hung up from a makeshift gibbet in the town square for the entire city to see.

_The Master will not be pleased. _The demon continued to stare impassively at the tableau of carnage unfolding before him.

Such mutilations and lynchings had become an increasingly common occurrence in this land caught in the riptide of impending war. The occupying force had pushed the people to the brink, had subjugated and humiliated them, and pillaged and plundered their land. And in return, the populace had begun to turn to violence, had begun to support whatever insurgency was willing to take on the great Empire's army. And so all sides of this wretched, internecine clash lurched towards war with all the equanimity of a wounded animal, all the clearheaded forethought of a drunken man.

The demon had seen the same sequence play out in the past, and would see it again and again in future. History repeats itself, and in an infinite timespan, everything recurs an infinite number of times. The pointless, never-ending battles between factions mattered little to him, as did the outcome. He had been summoned to perform a task, to reach a goal, to procure and consume a soul. The _morality_ of it, the right and wrong of it, mattered little to him. He had lived long enough among humans to know that 'right' and 'wrong', 'good' and 'evil', were malleable concepts, their shape easily plied and rough edges smoothed away to fit whatever narrative was deemed most convenient; whatever lies humans wanted to tell themselves, wanted to believe.

In an infinite timeline, everything recurs, rendering all that happened before it meaningless.

The crowd had started to dissipate. The frenzy and anger and bloodlust having peaked, plateaued like a great tide, and now starting to ebb. The mutilated body – what was left of it - now lay hung up on the town square, shredded flesh and grey-and-purple entrails spilling forth from his abdomen, dangling like a broken pendulum. The sun was suspended in its midday position in the cloudless sky, its rays beating down mercilessly upon the desert town. It would not be long before the heat would rot the flesh of the mutilated corpse, the sickening and putrid fetor of decay and decomposition remaining in the town centre for days to come, long after the mangled remains had been transported away from the square by the temple servants.

_The Master will not be pleased_, the demon thought as he made his way back to the governor's palace, walking along the dirt covered roads lined with palm and olive trees. The static oppressiveness of the desert heat was punctured by an occasional dry, gasping breeze that blew sand into his eyes and mouth. He could almost feel the ground smoldering beneath him from the unrelenting swelter.

The 'victim' - if such a name would apply to anyone on either side of this wretched battle - was a high priest, a member of the aristocracy- and by extension, in collusion with the ruling Empire; nestled in a symbiotic alliance of convenience that allowed both agents to remain buoyant, to maintain their grasp on power. The Master had counted on him to mollify the inhabitants, to enlighten them as to the futility and folly of their resistance. Clearly, a new strategy would need to be developed.

The demon walked through the stone arched portico of the palace and into the main dining hall, making sure to adopt the appropriate subservient posture as per the preference of the Master. The Master was sitting at the dining table, attended to by an assembly of servants and civil officials. The white woolen drapes of his ceremonial garb stuck to the mounded flesh of his rotund shape, and sweat dripped down his pockmarked and bloated face. He looked up with mild interest, and barked in the general direction of the demon.

"Why have you returned so soon?"

The Master's face became more and more twisted in fury as the demon told him of the unfortunate turn of events in the town square. His jaw clenched and his fists tightened, as he stood up and approached the demon, fire in his eyes like the roiling flames of the desert sun. The demon had finished explaining by the time the Master stepped in front of him. Without missing a beat, the Master slapped him across the face, the jeweled band of his ring snagging on the demon's cheek and ripping the skin where a thin curtain of blood flowed down his face. The demon lowered his head in what he had learned to be a show of meekness and submission appealing to his Master.

"Kneel" the Master ordered as he turned back to the antechamber.

The demon did as he was told, lowering his tunic and keeping his gaze downcast in a theatre of deference and fear. The Master returned, gripping the flagellum, its straps slung over the flattened palm of his other hand.

The master swung his arm back and forth as the metal-knotted thongs of the scourge made contact with the demon's human flesh. And through the palace the sounds of crashes like thunder could be heard as leather hit skin and skin parted like the Red Sea.

...

...

...

"Who are you?" the tiny figure speaks into the stillness.

The demon moves through the room, slowly emerging out of smoke and ash and a rain of obsidian feathers, shuddering out of his true form as slender coils of black and plumes of darkness billow from him, vanishing like the morning fog as dawn melts into day. He has already seen the boy's mind - if not yet his face and form - so he knows the boy's wants, understands his most fervent desires. He slowly melds into the shape of his new master's wishes, tendrils of black mist turning into human limbs as he straightens the woolen tailcoat over his torso and pulls the silk white gloves over slender, black-tipped fingers. He walks through the carnage of bodies, entrails and viscera, errant limbs and bones littering his path. The marble white floor is now red, awash with blood and human filth. The room is quiet as a mausoleum wherein – just moments ago – ear-shattering screams and wails choked the atmosphere like a dense noxious fume. All of them screaming for help, screaming for mercy as claws wrapped around their necks and crushed their windpipes, as fangs tore into their throats and consumed the blood spewed from their jugular, as tentacles dove into their chests, eviscerated their insides and tore out their still-beating hearts. They all screamed and screamed for mercy, though no mercy would be accorded to them, of course. Fitting, since they themselves had demonstrated none.

Now all was eerily calm. Quiet except for the question just now uttered by the small creature in the covered steel cage at the centre of the hall.

The demon walks over to the cage, slow and weightless as an exhaled breath, and removes the cover to bend down and peer inside.

"Who are you?" the boy asks again, now seeing the demon, or rather, the human form he has morphed into, for the first time.

"You called for me, my lord. I am what you summoned."

"You are a demon." the boy surmises. Not a question, but the demon nevertheless answers, "Yes, my lord."

The demon continues to observe the child through the steel bars of the cage, wrapping a hand around the rods and kneeling down. And there he is, a tiny wisp of a boy. He is so small, so fragile a creature, crumpled on the floor with his legs curled up against his torso and arms wrapped around his knees.

The demon could not recall ever having had such a tiny master.

He is covered with blood and wounds, some half-healed, some still bleeding; bruises leading a splattered trail through his limbs and torso like an ancient map of the constellations. The tattered remains of a paper-thin garment hang from bony shoulders, sticking to the concavity below his clavicles. The floor of the cage is covered with dirt and dried blood and the boy's own sick and filth. The stench of rot and putrefaction is noxious – or would be if the demon were _human_. The child likely would not have lasted much longer had the demon not intervened on his behalf to rescue him from his own kind.

"Are they all dead?" the boy asks, his throat still raw and his voice wavering.

"Yes, my lord. You wished it, and so it was done."

"I did? I wished this?" he breathes, looking overwhelmed and wearied, as he scans the room with dull, weather-beaten eyes.

"Yes. You ordered it when you summoned me."

"If I had wished it, I would have wanted their deaths to be slower, more painful. They deserved no better." He said, his voice all of a sudden far steelier. The demon blinks.

The boy turns his gaze back onto the demon, and scrutinizes the shape staring at him from outside the bars. His skin is an unearthly ivory pale, set against locks of ink-black hair. His eyes are an uncanny shade of auburn, at times red like wine, at others brown like mahogany. His inscrutable expression betrays no malice nor sympathy, no desire nor contempt, only a mild detached curiosity. It is a somewhat unsettling combination, though the boy cannot ascertain exactly why. It is not entirely discomfiting – there is a comfortable familiarity mixed with the strange beauty.

"You _look_ human," he says finally.

"I am not." The demon responds in a clipped tone. And as if to demonstrate, begins to bend apart the bars of the steel cage to release his new master. He reaches in to fetch the boy, but the child shrinks back from his touch with a start, screaming "Don't _touch_ me!" The demon, startled, withdraws his hands and holds his palms up in a placating gesture. The boy has shifted away and is crouching on the opposite side of the cage from him.

"My lord, I do not wish to harm you."

"I don't want to be touched." He says quietly.

"You are quite injured." The demon says, his gaze resting on the boy's mangled, emaciated legs. "I do not believe that you will be able to stand on your own."

The boy looks at his limbs, runs a hand over the wounds, and winces in pain. He tries to stand o**n **his legs, but collapses to the floor almost immediately, face contorted in agony. He looks back at the demon and then averts his gaze, eyes wet and lost and hollow. "alright," he says, defeated, voice barely above a whisper now, "You may touch me." Whatever conviction, or bravado, had been there a moment ago now has vanished.

The demon reaches for his master again, and as gently as he can, takes the boy into his arms, balancing his thighs in one hand, and letting him rest against his shoulder. He weighs next to nothing. He senses the boy tense and coil up at his touch, seeming to tolerate it but only barely.

"Burn it." The child whispers, his head coming to rest against the crook of the demon's neck. "Burn it all to ashes. Leave nothing behind."

"Yes, my lord." And the demon waves a hand in front of a torch affixed to a nearby column, beckoning the flame so that it flickers to life, frees itself from its vessel, chases around the corners and climbs up the walls, and begins to engulf the room. They walk away from the cage, amid the detritus of human bodies littering the ground, as the fire devours all the wretchedness inside within in its consumptive and purifying splendour.

...

The demon stands outside for some time, with his young master cradled in his arms, watching as the conflagrations engulf the manor, and ash-gray tufts of smoke float up like ghosts to the black starless sky. He turns and watches his master as his master watches the spectacle, face impassive and frayed. He watches the reflection of the flames in the boy's mismatched eyes, one blue like the ocean, the other violet and flush, still bleeding from where he had carved the mark of their covenant. He brings a hand and runs a finger to trace the outlines of the marked eye. The boy flinches at the touch, and the demon withdraws. Sensing his master's discomfort with being so scrutinized, he turns his gaze away, back to the fire, and waits.

"What will you do now?" the boy says finally.

"Whatever my master orders." He responds.

The boy looks dazed, and rests his head on the demon's shoulder. "What _I_ order?"

"Yes, young master. For the duration of our contract, I belong to you. I am yours to do with as you please. I perform whatever actions, acquire whatever goals my master desires."

The boy looks at him, stunned and overwhelmed and exhausted. He contemplates the enormity of the thing he has done, the unfathomable enormity of the _thing_ currently cradling him.

"What shall I call you?" He says, unable to think of anything else to ask. "What is your name?"

"It is whatever my master wishes."


	2. Empty places

The desert town was bathed in black, the pale glow of the half-moon the only guiding light piercing through the darkness. The night had brought with it a cool, dry breeze which swept over the area, offering respite from the sweltering daytime heat. The city had long ago gone to sleep and the din of daytime bustle was replaced by the hiss and whining trill of the cicadas.

It was quiet in the governor's palace. All domestic duties had been completed, all planning for the following day finalized, and the Master was in his bed asleep, and did not require his services. The demon sat on his rarely used cot in the servant's chamber and looked at the sparkling desert sky through the tiny window of his quarters. He stared at the blanket of stars, thought to be divine communion, messages from the Gods, portents of doom, famine, war, hunger. He only saw the travelling echoes from long-ago extinguished balls of gas and dust.

He rarely found himself with nothing to do. He continued to look through the window, watching but not really seeing. Thinking.

He did not like these moments. If he had to express a preference, it would be to not be so immersed in silence, so submersed in the muted vacancy of the night. It was in these moments that the _feeling_ would float up to the surface, wash up along the shores of his psyche like so much jetsam. That gnawing … _ache_? That thing, that _void_ that seemed to lay side by side his hunger, that seemed to make up his substance without actually _being_ anything. Like the emptiness that makes up so much of the universe; the space within atoms and molecules, the space between stars and galaxies. That thing that was not like a _self_, but rather the hollowness around it.

Time is a strange thing for a demon, and in these moments, time seemed to slow down to an anesthetized crawl. To a soporific languor like a heavy fog. So that all he could see when he stared into the expanse of time was an infinity of blackness and void, as dark and endless as a desert night.

He could rest, he thought. Sleep was not as frequent a necessity for demons as it was for humans, though it was occasionally needed to restore his strength or recover from a particularly brutal injury to his physical form. The strange, alien sting from the welts doled out by the Master's scourge glided along his human body, like the scratches from the paws of an animal skittering across a windowpane. The sensation was like a thing that he could observe, pick apart and examine.

If he were so inclined.

He sighed and laid on his back on his cot and looked up, traced the lines of the cracks in the ceiling, watched as a grasshopper jumped from the windowsill to the edge of the crown molding and then back out the window to be swallowed up by the night. He looked at his arms, observed the olive-coloured skin, ran the pads of his fingers over the veins wrapping themselves around his forearms. He picked at the scabs of the healing welts on his torso and shoulders to watch the trickle of blood, ruby red pearls against tan skin. He put his blood-covered fingers in his mouth, to taste the metallic sting of his own blood against his tongue.

He rolled on his side and folded his legs and looked at the wall of his quarters. He tried to fill his mind with something, remember something. Tried to bring up an image, a song, a scent. Tried to tell himself a story. Something to cut through the quiet of the early morning hour, the deathly quiet of his own mind. His thoughts reached out and grasped and grasped, but came back empty-handed.

He finally abandoned the effort, closed his eyes and tried to sleep.

...

...

...

This child is _difficult_.

The demon discovers this while tending to his wounds inside the manor he fashioned out of bricks and mortar, out of cinder and dust, out of the jumbled, fragmented memories of his new master.

Whatever state of stoicism, or _stupor_, the boy had possessed upon being rescued had vanished, scattered away like the ashes of the old Phantomhive Manor, leaving Sebastian with a trauma-addled child, wracked with anger and fear. He is now every bit the desperate ten-year-old who reached out to the darkness, screaming and begging for deliverance regardless of the price. He is curled up in the corner of his bedroom as Sebastian makes attempts in vain to soothe him enough to allow him to wash and dress his wounds.

"It hurts! You're too rough!" Ciel yelps, shrinking away against the wall and batting at his butler with tiny limbs.

"I apologize young master, but it is necessary." Sebastian states, coolly efficient and calm.

"When Tanaka used to do this, he was much gentler." The boy whines, twisting his body away, trying to protect his wounds from the burning sting of the antiseptic on Sebastian's washcloth.

"Yes, well, young master, I am not Tanaka." The boy drops his gaze, and looks defeated.

"Please, try to remember, that I am not your guardian or your mother or your father. I am your servant." Sebastian repeats, not unkindly.

"I know." Ciel says, his voice small and barely audible. "I know you're not."

The boy looks tiny and broken and lost, and Sebastian feels a pang, somewhere deep inside him, feels an unfamiliar ache. A curious sensation, strange and novel, deep inside his chest, like something inside him attempting to come loose.

He takes a breath, attempts to marshal his patience, and tries again.

"Young master, please -" he starts, modulating his voice into what he assumes to be a soothing, parental cadence, before reaching for the boy's wounds with the washcloth.

"Get _away_ from me!" Ciel cries again as he cowers further to the corner of the room. "Do _not_ touch me! I don't wish to be touched…"

"My lord, please, you will need to trust me." Sebastian crouches down to eye level, attempting to appear non-threatening, as if trying to beckon forth a small, skittish animal. "I do not wish to harm you."

"Why should I trust you? You are a _demon_!" He cries, as his face crumples and an agonized sob is ripped from his throat.

"Yes, but one that is bound by contract to protect you." Sebastian sighs. "I have sworn to be your guardian and your knight, and that is what I will be."

"You say that you will not harm me?"

"No, my lord. I will not."

"And yet you wish to destroy me and consume my soul." Sebastian watches the boy become more anguished, his voice strangled with sobs, trapped in ever increasing paroxysms of despair. Watches his eyes become wet as hot, angry tears begin to spill down his cheeks.

"Yes, my lord. But once you have obtained your vengeance. This is the nature of our covenant."

The boy has at this point worked himself into hysterics, and is taking in deep, frantic gulps of air between wracking sobs, his mouth gasping and lungs expanding like the desperate inhales of a fish flapping at the bottom of a trawling boat.

"How can I be sure that you will not harm me before then? That you will not get impatient, or bored, or hungry, and tear into my flesh and rip me limb from limb?" He begins to choke on his sobs as he spits out "Really, what is there here to _stop you_?" His face is blotched and wet and contorted, and the demon's gaze falls on the pool of saliva gathering around the corner of the child's mouth, drops of it rolling down his chin as he rocks back and forth with each wail wrenched from his chest.

"My lord, please understand." Sebastian says softly, attempting one last time to calm his new master. "Breaking the contract is not in my nature."

"Your _nature_, is it? The _nature_ of our covenant, is it?" Ciel shouts between staccatoed hiccups, as he coughs and retches through his sobs. "What about your _nature_, Sebastian? What can you tell me about _that_?"

Sebastian sighs. Sensing the futility of attempting to reason with the child when he is in such a state, the demon stands up, bows uselessly to his shattered and broken new master, and walks out of the room.

...

The demon could not tell the boy much about his nature.

Or his provenance.

He cannot not remember his birth. He is not sure if he had a birth. If there was a branching point in time, a line bisecting the world into one before he existed and one after. If there was, he cannot not remember it. If he had to put forth a conjecture, formulate a hypothesis, he would say that he did not have a birth. Demons are immortal beings. Their lifespans stretch infinite. Logic would dictate that this is bidirectional, spans a line from the past into the future. If there is no end, then one would presume that there cannot be a beginning.

Of course, he can only infer this, not know it.

There was so much about his own existence that he could not know. This was the nature of a demon's life, he supposed. Moving from one contract to the next, one soul to the next. The times between contracts were spent in some dark shadow at the periphery of the world, an abyssal emptiness, the negative space around time and existence, while he waited to be summoned.

And when summoned, he performed his tasks, became whatever his masters wanted, achieved whatever meaningless goal his masters required, rolled the boulder up the hill, only to possess and consume their souls – with no malice of intent or desire, this was just the way things were - , and return to the same shadowy emptiness and vacancy from which he was sprung. There was no use in questioning any of it. Such was the nature of a demon's life. Trying to trace the origins of his self was like trying to map out the latitude and longitude of one's coordinates in a dream. He remembered certain things, patches and scraps here and there, but for the most part, his memories of his previous contractors and his previous lives remained as intangible as smoke, filtered through his consciousness like water through the fingers of a clenched fist.

A demon's existence is one of solitude, even when contracted. He didn't know what loneliness felt like, because he didn't know what feelings felt like, and loneliness had always struck him as a particularly _human_ feeling. Emotions seem to work in opposition to each other, seem to exist in opposing binary pairs. One could not exist, could not be perceived, without its opposite. Light cannot be understood without understanding darkness, and darkness is merely the absence of light. A lie can only be discovered as a Lie when it is juxtaposed with the Truth. Even within the universe, the things you see cannot exist without the things you can't. Much of the universe is made up of substance that can never be perceived; whose existence one can only posit from the movements of the things one _can _perceive. Hence it would make sense, the demon had always reasoned, that the same is true of emotions; one cannot understand love unless one understands hate; one cannot understand bliss unless one understand despair. One cannot feel unmoored if one has never felt tethered. And one cannot feel loneliness if one has never felt kinship.

...

That first night, and the day after, and the day after that, the young master does not leave his room. Sebastian would come into his chamber, to bring him a meal or a change of clothes, or simply to check if the boy was indeed still alive and breathing, and find him in bed, his tiny body sheathed in a cocoon of Egyptian cotton and lattice coverlet. The boy does not acknowledge Sebastian's presence. Does not speak a word or make a sound.

Sebastian would roll the trolley containing the master's dinner or snack, and wordlessly leave it by the bed after picking up the untouched plates of food left from the previous meal.

He would wonder if it was actually possible for a human to will himself out of existence, to starve himself into erasure, the way his young master seemed intent on doing.

Then on the first fortnight, the young master finally emerges. Sebastian is in the kitchen keeping himself occupied and helping along the passage of time by polishing the Phantomhives' prodigious collection of antique silverware. He is sitting at the bench of the solid oak kitchen table, silver polish and cloth in hand, when he hears light footsteps approaching in the hallway. He looks up to find the tiny master in the doorway, leaning against the frame as if needing a prop to hold him up. The boy catches the demon's gaze and looks away. He stays in the same spot, staring unseeingly into the distance while Sebastian observes him with studious curiosity.

He looks so frail and fragile, as if the effort of standing or speaking or breathing would be too much and he would collapse, vanish into the ether, blow away with a gust of wind like remnant ash at the foot of a dying fire. The demon feels a pang.

"It's too quiet in my room." He says finally, looking down to the floor. "I can't sleep." This is of course a lie. It was not the quiet in his room, but the chorus of screams and wails inside his head that have kept him from sleep.

Sebastian accepts this, nods, and directs his eyes away from his master and back to the silverware. Free of his butler's unnerving gaze, the boy starts to move toward the centre of the kitchen. Sebastian tries to occupy himself with the task of polishing, very deliberately tries not to stare at the young master as he circles toward him tentatively, like a battered, fearful stray approaching a proffered bowl of scraps, on alert in case of a betrayal.

Finally, the boy comes upon the bench and sits at the edge away from Sebastian. Sebastian continues to work away at the silverware, while Ciel warily observes him, seeming to finally come to a decision, to send up the white flag. He edges closer and closer to Sebastian, until he is sitting next to the demon. With one final mournful look, Ciel leans against his side and rests his cheek against his butler's arm. Sebastian sets down the silverware and polish and turns to look down at the boy as he rubs his face against the cloth of his dress shirt. He watches as the boy's chin quivers and his eyes become wet, and silent tears fall down his cheeks. He watches transfixed as the boy processes through all the misery of the past month, an infinity of torment and loss contained between the wax and wane of the moon. The demon watches as the boy tries to envision his future, with everything he ever had taken from him and replaced with darkness and misery, loneliness and despair, and a lone creature seeking to consume and devour him.

Sebastian can see it all flashing across the boy's face, and it makes that thing inside him come loose, that thing inside him _ache_. Acting on a strange impulse, he reaches out to run his hand through the boy's hair. He expects the boy to slap his hand away, but the child grips his sleeve with clenched fingers as he turns to bury his face in the demon's arm.

He doesn't sob, or scream, or wail. The kitchen remains quiet as an abandoned mine, except for the occasional shuddering breath and muted sniffle, and the sound of fabric against skin as the boy wipes his nose against the hem of his own nightshirt, and his tears soak through the sleeve of Sebastian's dress shirt.

The stay like this for what seems like hours, while the boy mourns for all the things he had lost, for all the things he used to be, and Sebastian can only watch this unfold mesmerized and riveted by the purity of it, feeling the sting of something unrecognizable, something previously unimagined, some new and thrilling ache in his own chest as it expands against his ribs.


	3. Older and far away

Ciel was five years old. And he didn't understand.

But he was afflicted with that strange facility that children have of blaming themselves for everything.

He was looking at the mutilated carcasses of his two pet rabbits, lying lifeless on the dusted floor of their cage near the manor's garden nursery, just off the wooded area downhill. It was chilly in the dawn hour, and the sky had that lavender colour of lilies and orchids, when the sun's rays were just beginning to peak out from the receding blanket of night. Ciel had managed to leave the manor before Tanaka could wrangle him to get him dressed and groomed for the day, and so was now standing outside the cage, shivering in his cotton pajamas and dressing gown. The faint rustle of the wind in the branches mingled with the early-morning chorus of the blackbirds and robins that lived inside of the hunched-over willow trees dotting the grounds of the Phantomhives' estate.

He wrapped his arms around himself to brace against the morning chill, as his eyes trailed over the creatures' unmoving bodies.

Their plush white fur was stained with splatters of blood, and he thought about that time he cut his palm on a toy soldier that he had just gotten for Christmas, when he was showing it off to Lizzie, and how the sanguine drops falling from his hand looked like rose petals against the virgin snow at his feet.

Ciel chewed on his lip and stared, as he began to feel his throat start to clench. He could smell the lingering earthy scent of a recently fallen Autumn rain, which had left a sheen of dew drops on the petals of his mother's white roses in the garden bed nearby. _Petrichor_, his father had called that scent – that clean, earthy rain-smell. Ciel remembered thinking that it was so strange that everything had a name; that such things as specific scents had such specific names.

It looked like whatever had attacked them during the night, maybe a fox or a badger, had managed to overcome them after a very quick battle. They both lay in the corner of the cage, near the grate, as if they had tried to claw their way out when they realized they had been besieged.

"They won't wake up," he said uselessly to the presence lingering behind him, just outside his field of vision.

Vincent walked over quietly to stand next to him, and put a hand on his shoulder to give it a light squeeze. "I know. I'm sorry."

"I think it's my fault." Ciel said, his voice soft and wavering, looking down to hide his face away from his father. "I forgot to close the latch on the cage after playing with them last night." His face began to crumple, and silent, guilty tears started to mark a trail down snowdrift-white cheeks.

In one elegant move, Vincent bent down to scoop him up in his arms and cradle his head against his shoulders. "Shhh… my sweet prince, it's alright." He cooed to him, as he ran his hand though the boy's hair and over his back. "Nothing is your fault."

Ciel continued to cry silently against Vincent's shoulders. "Then why?"

"Sometimes these things happen. You can't blame yourself."

"But _why_? Why does it happen?"

"Everything happens for a reason." Vincent told him in a gentle tone. "It is not always clear to us at the time." He placed a kiss on the crown of the boy's head. "But everything happens for a reason."

...

Those first few months after the contract, the walls of Phantomhive Manor groan with pain. Pain seems to seep through every crack, pour through every crevice, drip down every wall. It seems to encase all the structures inside within its venomous amber. Sebastian could not be sure but he did not think that he had ever had a master quite so fragile and broken, quite so small and tragic.

Time is a strange thing for a human.

Time is relative, and so is the perception of it. Time _feels_ inconstant and mutable, stretched out at the beginning of life, and compressed at its end. Time seems to meander through consciousness like algae floating down a stream, catching on jutting boulders; anchoring and coiling itself around the most joyful - or most harrowing - events, so that these seem to stretch toward infinity in one's memory.

For the demon's young master, that one month of pain and torture and despair had expanded to eclipse the ten years that preceded it, and now has left a permanent residue on the core of who he was, that would define the substance of who he would become. It was not simply the loss of everything that he had, everything that gave his life security, safety, meaning. His parents, his home, his pride, his dignity. While those losses would have been enough to wound and fracture, it was some greater loss that annihilated the child that his young master had been.

It was the upsetting of a worldview – the view that the world was a _good_ place; that it was safe, logical, reasonable.

That his parents could keep him unharmed.

That people were fundamentally benevolent, trustworthy, well-intentioned.

His sheltered life and blessed upbringing had not exposed him to any other way to view the world.

But now, he was forced to see everything through the filter of his recent loss and trauma. And through this prism, the world had become distorted, mangled and ugly, like seeing things through a cracked and broken piece of glass, or seeing it reflected in a funhouse mirror. It was like falling asleep in your real life and waking up in a nightmare world, and then finding out that the nightmare is real, and what you had thought was your idyllic life was only just a dream.

In those first few months, Ciel Phantomhive sets upon to anchor himself within the maelstrom of his loss and grief, of his anger and hatred. Simply because it is all he can do. Because he has to. Because the only other option is to drown, to let himself be pulled down by the undertow. So he works to rebuild himself. Not the self that he was before his abduction and torture, but a new self, as his wounds slowly begin to heal.

Or at least, begin to scab over.

The demon knows that wounds never actually heal – the body never goes back to what it was originally prior to the injury. Broken bones form calluses as they mend, and flesh forms scar tissue over its shredded and torn pieces, as it fumbles grasping towards the shape of its former self. The end result is a best-guess approximation on the part of the body as to what it was before the trauma.

Often, these tissues become mangled and gnarled almost beyond recognition in the body's wayward attempts at healing, leaving behind a tumorous scar, painful and raw; a constant reminder of the inflicted injury, and the ruin left in its wake. The same must be true of the psyche, of the soul. While some souls can regain some semblance of their former selves, others become charred and painful, like the blistering skin of a burn victim, like the persistent ache of a phantom limb.

The boy would have good days and bad days. He would start some days sure in his conviction to regain himself, to reassemble the pieces of himself through sheer willpower and fortitude, to claw back up the ranks and reclaim his status and his noble name. On other days, he would regress. Something – some memory, some reminder of his former life - might set him off into waves of panic and hysteria, and he would be inconsolable for hours.

Terror and nightmares would still find him in the darkness, stalking him like a prey, quivering and exposed. On more than one occasion Sebastian would have to come to his bedchamber in the middle of the night as he woke screaming from the jumbled images and voices that haunted his dreams. He would have to change his master's urine-soaked bedsheets while he spoke to him in a gentle cadence to try and calm his primal screams, to try to guide him out of the blood-soaked maze of his nightmares. He would then clean up his trauma-sick and broken master, while the young lord averted his gaze and his cheeks flushed with shame,

"Sebastian, I – "

"It is alright, young master."

Afterwards, he would cradle him on his lap, rubbing his back and stoking his hair and cooing to him in what he thought was a close approximation of a parental embrace. It was what his master desired - and so it was what Sebastian had to do. While under other circumstances, the boy shrank from his touch, would slap his hand away, in these moments, the child seemed desperate for contact and security, allowed himself to be cradled and held, embraced in something – anything - that could pass for warmth and affection.

In these moments, Sebastian could feel the waves of loneliness and despair washing over the boy, threatening to pull him under. The purity of it, the beauty, the absolute _novelty_ of it, would tear at something unrecognizable in Sebastian's chest. It pushed at something inside him previously thought immovable – thrust itself against the Pole Star of his static existence. It fascinated him to try to trace the outlines of the jagged edges of whatever was digging and burrowing into his human chest, into his demon heart. It was a tiny flower blooming in a salted earth. Sebastian wanted to shield it, this thing inside him, this novelty – put a glass case over it to protect it, and watch it bloom - if only out of sheer curiosity of what it might morph into, what other transformation it might spawn.

And as for the young lord, he would - during his moments of lucidity - look around and see a world unchanged, unmarked by the tragedy and the horrors that had ripped everything away from him. And he would feel _this_ to be the greatest injustice; a gallon of salt excoriating a festering wound. _His_ world has been destroyed, and yet the sun continues to rise everyday, the wind continues to blow through the branches, and the birds continue to sing their morning chorus.

And he doesn't understand.

There should be a hole in the world to match the hole in his heart, and yet the Earth continues to turn on its axis oblivious to all he has suffered and to all he has lost.

And so somewhere within the infernal hearth of these first few months, the young master's foolish pursuit of revenge begins to take shape, to become forged from the molten alloy of his anguish, from the fiery embers of his hatred. He works at it, hammering away at its embryonic form, molding it, and pouring it out to cast it into the new shape he needs. Into the new shape of himself he can crawl into. He does this because he _needs_ a new shape, a new purpose, something to allow him to excise the despair and powerlessness from his life, like one would a cancerous mass, necrotic and oozing, clasped against scarred flesh and mended bones.

And in doing so the young lord finds that he cares less and less about the fate of his _soul_ \- where it will end up, how it will be destroyed. He no longer has confidence that his soul would have been better off, destined perhaps for some benevolent afterlife swathed in Light and divine love, had he _not_ bartered it away. A _soul_, the young master decides with growing derision, is a thing of little value in this universe without rules, without a guiding light and moral absolutes. A _soul_, he ultimately concludes, seems like a small price to pay in exchange for retribution. For a shift in the universe - even if _only_ by a small measure, even if _only_ for a short time - in response to his suffering, in recognition of his loss. A soul is a small price to pay for some semblance of balance, of meaning.

His revenge begins to give shape to his days, to bring form to the volatile chaos of his emotions. It becomes a dam channelling the turbulent waters of his hatred, it becomes a solid lattice bridling the rambling vines of his anguish. It becomes a thing to hold onto, a spider's thread to pull himself up by, out of the abyss of his despair. It becomes his boulder to push up the hill.


	4. Entropy

Ciel is confused about his demon.

He spends days and nights waiting for Sebastian to do something… demonic. He waits, sometimes patiently, sometimes not, for a glimpse of his true form, his true nature.

He sits on the floor of the Phantomhives' stately, echoing library, a book of Renaissance paintings resting open on his lap, searching through pictures of devils and demons, gargoyles and monsters, beasts and dragons, and tries to deduce Sebastian's taxonomy.

He thumbs through a copy of his father's King James Bible, leather-bound and gold-gilt, letting his fingers glide over its smooth cotton linen pages, and looks up at Sebastian to try and locate a pitched tail, or jagged horns.

He waits for a glimpse of a serpent tongue, of black-taloned claws. Of cloven hoofs. He waits for a flash of sharpened fangs as one of Sebastian's smiles widens into a cruel, hungry rictus smirk.

He _wants _to see Sebastian's unnervingly intense, thick-lashed rust-brown eyes flash scarlet and crimson, filled with the roiling volcanic seas of Hell, when Ciel refuses to do his Latin translations, or tosses his violin bow to the ground in a fit of frustration and anger.

He _wants_ to see the smooth, unblemished moon-glow paleness of Sebastian's skin turn scaled and reptilian green just as he turns his face away to blow out the candles resting on Ciel's nightstand to immerse them both in treacherous darkness.

Each time he turns a corner while walking the halls of his cavernous, labyrinthine mansion, he braces, waiting to find Sebastian crouched down, his impossibly long limbs naked and wrapped in grey-green sinewy muscles, inhumanely beautiful face elongated into a wolf-like snout, feeding upon some lost animal or unfortunate intruder, snarling and growling as splatters of blood and bits of flesh cover his mouth and torso.

It is not so much fear that motivates this – more like an aggressive curiosity. He _wants_ to look under the beautiful disguise to see the ugly truth. He _wants _to draw the curtains back and glimpse into the terrors of the night.

He _wants_ to be proven right about Sebastian.

If humans have shown themselves to be demonic, then what of the devil himself?

And so he waits.

But Sebastian never provides the relief, the moment of epiphany when the thick cloak of pretense - the coolly efficient butler façade - dissipates to reveal the truth of his nature.

He looks up from his book and over at Sebastian, wordlessly dusting the antique volumes on mahogany shelves, and waits. Scrutinizes the demon until he is sure that the demon can feel his eyes on him. But still the demon does not react. Always seems to keep his eyes downcast or his gaze averted to allow the young lord to continue watching him undisturbed. Sebastian continues to walk back and forth under a pantomime of obliviousness under his master's watchful gaze, rearranging the white roses in a flower pot, or running a polishing cloth over Vincent's Regency terrestrial globe, or performing some other such menial task, making everything clean and beautiful and elegant, until it is time for him to go and fetch the master's afternoon tea.

"Ceylon tea, my lord. Served with chocolate macrons with fruit filling."

He stands to the side, just outside of Ciel's field of vision so the that Ciel always _feels_ him there like a spectre, while he sips his tea with feigned indifference.

The demon's eyes never reveal anything other than the most placid of auburns, shut occasionally in irritation that only reaches the intensity of 'mild' while he watches the spectacle of Ciel acting out, performing the theatre of the spoilt, insolent child.

And there are never any glimpses of fangs or incisors, sharpened or otherwise.

Perhaps this is because Sebastian rarely offers up anything more than an anemic tight-lipped smile, one that never seems to reach his eyes, awkward and tentative, as if he is still mastering facial expressions, or still habituating to the uncanniness of having a child as a master.

Ultimately, what Ciel really wants to see is clarity of motivations. No longer will he avert his eyes, or look at the hideousness of this world through the spaces between his fingers. Never again will he allow himself to be overcome by the ugliness and horror that is the primary substance and motor force in this wretched, rotted earth.

He wants to know the _truth_. The contract has a clarity to it that is crystalline in its purity. One revenge obtained. One soul scales of it balanced, in the young lord's estimation, in perfect equipoise.

But the waters of this otherwise crystalline pond are constantly muddied by Sebastian's unanticipatedly impenetrable nature, his decidedly undemonic behaviour. His lack of hunger, lack of bloodlust, lack of malignant craving and gleeful savagery. His detached manner and seeming _-indifference_\- are maddening in their opacity. What is his primary mover if not hunger? What is his primary desire if not bloodlust?

When will he turn on his master like a previously beloved and faithful dog gone rabid, biting and howling and tearing through flesh and bone?

And so Ciel waits. And with each passing day, each day that he wakes up to the gentle rustle of curtains against the window pane and goes to sleep after the flickering out of a candlelight, each day that he has not been ripped to shreds by his strange and unknowable new pet, Ciel grows more impatient, almost resentful of being denied the satisfaction.

...

Time is a strange thing for a human. There seems to be a certain inevitability to the pull of it, to its unfolding, to the sequence of events that line its passage like domino pieces readying to fall. All outcomes seem like the natural consequences of the events that preceded them, as if no other eventuality is possible. As if the world as we know it is the only one that could exist.

The young master, the demon notes, has a strange affinity toward self-destruction. This seems to be a mere fact of his existence, operating like a gravitational pull, like the laws of physics. All systems tend toward chaos. Entropy moves everything away from a state of order, and toward decay. Self-annihilation is built into life at the point of inception, like a kill switch or a time bomb.

With the case of the young lord, the only curiosity is whether this drive towards self-immolation is conscious or unconscious. Or perhaps something etched into his destiny, sown into the fabric of his fate, and only delayed as a result of the demon's own intervention, the contract acting as a prop holding up - if only temporarily - the fall of the domino pieces. The demon wonders with increasing fascination whether this fate is something he himself will be able to offset until such time that master has obtained his revenge. If it is something _in his master_ that the demon will have to temper, or if it is the manifestation of a spurned and slighted universe seeking restitution, or seeking to remedy an intolerable oversight.

Today, fate has made herself manifest in the shape of an unbroken mare, currently whining and snorting at his young master inside the Phantomhives' stables after the boy's unfortunate attempts to tame and mount it outside of Sebastian's supervision.

Ciel has in the preceding months marched toward rebuilding himself, and the demon has kept pace in rebuilding the Phantomhive Manor and the Phantomhive Earldom in step with each of the young master's strides forward. It is the demon's duty to give the young lord what he wants, but what Ciel wants seems to be a fluid thing, never fully coming into focus. Nevertheless, the demon tries to maintain his crosshairs on this moving target, to remake himself, reorganize the building blocks of _Sebastian Michaelis_ in order to better mold himself to the shape of his master's desires. The young master needs the edification of a Noble, and thus Sebastian becomes a tutor; he needs the skills and discipline of a hunter, and thus Sebastian becomes an expert marksman. He needs to be proficient in languages, proficient in music and the arts, and so Sebastian becomes a polyglot, Sebastian becomes a polymath

The young lord's original goal of revenge seems to rise and fall in urgency, sometimes being replaced by simply making it through the day without falling to pieces or making it through the night without dissolving.

On this particular day, sometime between breakfast and his Latin lessons, the young lord has wandered off to the stables to once again stick his hands into the fire just to watch his skin crack and singe. In the tiny span of time that it took for the boy to attempt to mount the horse, for him to try to pull his tiny body atop, and for the mare to buck him off, Sebastian has placed himself between the two, and grabbed the young master just as he is about to hit the ground. The result is only a skinned knee and a few cuts on his calves, rather than the broken bones and shattered insides that would have resulted had the demon not intervened _yet again_ and placed himself, not for the first and very likely not for the last time, between the young master and his untimely fate.

When asked later what would possess the young master to be so reckless with his safety, he simply shrugs. "What does it matter? _You're _the only one here who has anything to lose."

The mare is shaking her head and neighing, angry and spooked, huffing in indignant bursts as she trots around the stable and a cloud of dust billows from her heavy, hoofed steps. Sebastian has his young master in his lap, his arms wrapped around him and the boy's head tucked underneath his chin to keep him shielded, should the mare decide to charge, or rear or kick or launch some other offensive against her master. The boy is tensed up under his touch, but startled enough in this moment to accept it. He meekly buries his face against the base of his butler's neck. Sebastian eyes the exit, and briefly considers simply killing the mare in the interest of expediency, but thinks better of it in front the boy. The mare eventually calms down enough for Sebastian to crawl out the enclosure, with his _difficult_ and unpredictable young master in tow.

Outside, Sebastian puts the boy down on the ground to check for injuries, and only then does he – and his young master – notice the deformity of cracked bones and torn tendons in Sebastian's own arm. Ciel's eyes widen as he follows the now jagged line of his butler's limb, and notes the blood spreading on his shirt sleeve like wine from a shattered glass. The demon takes note of the injury, and tries to put the pieces back together, as Ciel winces at the cracking sound of bones sliding together. He then reaches for his young master to pick him up, but Ciel flinches and stumbles back away from him.

"Young master, please. I will need to carry you back. Your legs are injured."

Ciel furrows his brow and chews on his lower lip, continues to stare at Sebastian's still-mangled limb.

"Does it hurt?" He asks softly as he brings his fingers to his mouth and chews on a finely manicured nail, all the while contemplating the bent angle of Sebastian's arm.

Sebastian looks at the arm again, and responds in a clipped, neutral tone. "The young master need not worry. Physical injuries will not prevent me from carrying my duties."

Ciel tears his gaze away from the arm to meet his butler's eyes. "That's not what I asked."

He continues to eye Sebastian with some mixture of incredulity and wariness. Sebastian sighs and softens his tone, feels that same pull on his seams somewhere deep inside, and thinks once again that he understands so little about his new master.

"No, my lord. It does not." As if to emphasize, Sebastian makes one final, decisive pull on his injured arm to set it back in its socket and to straighten the bones, feeling the crunch of calcified tissue echoing through his human form like a muted cry against the walls of an abandoned cave, while Ciel watches with a blend of horrified disgust and awe.

He then bends down to pick up the boy and cradle him in his arms and carry him back to the manor. He feels his young master's eyes on him as the boy continues to stare at the demon as if he could see inside his interior if he tried hard enough. The young lord opens his mouth once, twice, to say something, but eventually chooses to remain silent, and rests his head against the demon's shoulder.


End file.
